temporarily wuzzieless

The wuzzie is away for 4 days with his other woman [*], so I have the house to myself. I also have a reasonable amount of energy, so I have a load of plans involving cleaning, laundry, painting a shelving unit, filling holes in walls, rubbing down the filled plaster, washing down walls & painting them. I might also put some stuff on eBay. So much to do! Back at work now too, but I only have 4 students. I'm not taking on too many just yet, because I'm still having enough bad days to need to have lots of space in my timetable.

Also have to go to Sainsbury's because - and anyone who's ever seen The Carbohydrate Cupboard will probably die of shock at this point - we are OUT OF PASTA! Yup, there is no penne, conchiglie, fusilli bucati, fusilli tricolore, or pasta bows. There's just a box-and-a-half of lasagne sheets (which gives me a good idea for what to do with the left-over bolognaise sauce from the weekend) and 100g or so of wholewheat spaghetti. By the way, I have a confession to make: the vegan dairy-free cheese-flavoured sauce with a mere 0.4% fat is in fact edible. It doesn't taste wonderful, but it's more noticeably cheesy than any vegan cheese sauce I've had before. It is by a company called Free & Easy based in West Sussex, if you want to try to find it. Trying to decide if it will be sensible for me to take the trike to Sainsbury's, because it takes me an hour to walk there & back, and I have heavy stuff to carry. Might leave it 'til tomorrow when I'll have a bus pass.

Better stop waffling and get on with stuff now. btw, Take Part In Scientific Research: How many nipples do YOU have?. Enquiring minds want to know :)

[*] Paintball.

Moby & house accomplishment

Why did no one tell me how good Moby is?

I finally got round to listening to the albums I bought cheaply in Brussels, and... oh my god. I don't think I've ever heard a song for the first time and immediately put it on repeat.

( Boring housekeeping stuff. )

10 years ago

Today I remembered something bizarre I did in my first year at college. In my hall of residence, we had individual study-bedroom things arranged in 4s around a central hallway & bathroom. People were in the habit of leaving our bedroom doors open if we were available to talk - and often you'd hear music coming from someone else's room.

Now, there were certain albums, popular in 1994-5, that absolutely EVERYONE had. Things like the first Elastica album, and "Definitely Maybe" by Oasis. So sometimes I'd hear a record coming from someone else's room that I had myself.

So I wondered what would happen if I put on exactly the same record. How cool it would be if the two copies of the music were exactly in sync. Would you get superposition going on, with constructive and destructive interference as you ran between the two sets of speakers?

But it never worked. Even if my hall-mate & I were in clear sight of each other, and visibly counted 3, 2, 1 before hitting Play, we could never get the music in sync. Thinking back on it now, I realise some people's CD players were quicker to spin up than others.

So I gave up on that. And just tried to start my copy with an exact 5 second delay, so anyone coming into our hallway would think there was an echo.

My hall-mates made me keep my door shut after that. And thus, I learnt that even in a purely science-and-engineering college, geeks were in the minority.